Planned Canberra memorial to honour war correspondents

They are on the frontlines risking life and limb, but instead of weapons, they are armed with microphones and cameras.

From the days of Banjo Paterson, Australia has been sending war correspondents to cover the conflicts and ensure the people back home are informed.

There is now a push to build a permanent reminder of their sacrifice at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The War Correspondents Memorial is the brainchild of the CEW Bean Foundation, named after Australia's official World War I historian Charles Bean.

The foundation's chairman Rodney Cavalier says the project has been years in the planning and will honour those who have paid the ultimate price in the line of duty.

"We're talking about names that are well known - the newsreel cameraman Damian Parer, who's perhaps not so well known, but everyone's seen his newsreels, the first Australia to win an Academy Award, he died in the course of doing his duty - through to modern times, where Australians are right there reporting Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recent times Vietnam," he said.

Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson says that war correspondents play an integral part in preserving Australia's war history.

"That is why we have a record," he said.

"Because there are men and women who literally have risked, and in some cases, given their lives to see that there is a record and they continue to do so."

Tony Walker was one of the instigators of the Bean Foundation and served as a Middle East correspondent during the 1980s and 90s for Fairfax and the Financial Times of London, covering numerous conflicts.

"One thing about the Middle East, is there's no shortage of conflicts", he said.

Mr Walker was caught in the cross-fire while covering Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank, and took a bullet to the leg, luckily avoiding serious injury.

"It was one of those moments where I had let my guard down and was careless," he said.

He says the role of a war correspondent is to tell the unvarnished truth. But it can be difficult, like when he was covering the Camp Wars in Lebanon.

"One side was using bulldozers to bulldoze the houses of refugee settlements, and women and children were in those houses," he said.

"It's hard to be unemotional about those sorts of things."

'An all-seeing eye'

On Tuesday, the Bean Foundation hosted a dinner to raise funds for the proposed memorial.

Mr Cavalier says the hope is to raise around $1 million for the project.

He says the war correspondents memorial will be built in the War Memorial's sculpture garden, gently nestled into a slope.

"The design is known as an oculus and it's supposed to be an all-seeing eye," Mr Cavalier said.